Thanksgiving this year is being held in La Jolla. My parents are renting a house and hosting it there. Since my parents are hosting and they are driving to the location, I offered to try to help out with whatever I could.
I was able to go out and get the tablecloth for the adult table as well as get some of the food things that my mom needed. But I wanted to see if I could do something really awesome.
I’ve seen so many pins on Pinterest about what you can do with chalkboard paint. I’ve always wanted to try one, but I never knew what exactly I should do.
But then I saw an idea about making placemats with chalkboard paint. The ones I saw on Pinterest were made out of a fabric placemat where someone glued posterboard on it and covered the posterboard with the chalkboard paint. But since I had seen some other ideas about using the paint on fabric, I decided to try it but skip a step.
First, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond to get the placemats. While I knew it didn’t really matter what pattern I bought since one side would be covered with the paint and I thought that some of the paint might seep through to the other side, I still got the matching pattern to the tablecloth I bought.
Then I went to OSH and had a nice chat with the employee in the paint department. He was actually super helpful and said that as long as I did thick coats of paint on the placemats, the regular chalkboard paint would work and I wouldn’t have to do any fancy primers on it. I got the regular chalkboard paint and had it done in black since I didn’t know if I would want to do a coordinating color to the placemats.
Finally, it was time to attempt the project.
I got a bunch of ads from the mail and covered the concrete in front of my house with it. It’s really good that I did this step because I was a sloppy painter.
The first coat of paint went on pretty nicely. I did it really thick and used a lot more paint than I thought I would. But I wanted to make sure that I covered the entire thing and none of the colors were showing through.
I let it dry for a day and then went to work on the second coat of paint.
I didn’t have to do this one quite as thick, but I still wanted to make sure that there was good coverage over the entire placemat.
I let them dry for another day before I got out the chalk that I bought to see if these were a success.
And as you can tell from the happy face I drew that they were! They aren’t super easy to wipe off, but if you get a damp cloth it isn’t too bad.
I’m excited to see how the kids like these at the kid’s table at dinner. I’ll have to do an update when I do my Thanksgiving dinner recap!
But at least these were a Pinterest win and not a Pinterest fail!
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